Category: Talking Walls Discover Your World

http://www.un.org/en/events/peaceday/

https://www.facebook.com/peaceday

http://www.pinwheelsforpeace.com/pinwheelsforpeace/home.html.

I  bought Going to Mecca last summer and hope you can read it to your students so they know all about Hajj! http://islam.about.com/od/calendar/fl/When-is-Hajj-2015.htm

From Talking Walls

Each year millions of Muslims from around the world make the joyful journey to Mecca ,in Saudi Arabia,where Muhammad, the founder of Islam was born.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out

Robert Frost, from ” Mending Wall”

Let me know what you think of this reading of the poem: Robert Frost reads the poem to a video of the Berlin Wall

.!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTglCBLomXA

The jacket of Talking Walls Discover Your World shows the inspiration for the book, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. In the fall of 1990,  I listened to poet Doug Rawlings, co-founder Veterans for Peace read his poem, The Wall . As he read I thought about other walls and their stories and turned to my friend Elizabeth and told her that I might have a good idea for a book.

The Wall

Descending into this declivity
dug into our nation’ s capitol
by the cloven hoof
of yet another one of our country’ s
tropical wars

Slipping past the names of those
whose wounds
refuse to heal

Slipping past the panel where
my name would have been
could have been
perhaps should have been

Down to The Wall’ s greatest depth
where the beginning meets the end
I kneel

Staring through my own reflection
beyond the names of those
who died so young

Knowing now that The Wall
has finally found me \endash
58,000 thousand-yard stares
have fixed on me
as if I were their Pole Star
as if I could guide their mute testimony
back into the world
as if I could connect all those dots
in the nighttime sky
As if I
could tell them
the reason why

http://voiceseducation.org/content/doug-rawlings-veterans-peace

http://www.insideoutproject.net/

“This project takes street photography and makes it personal by taking literally anyone’s photograph and putting it on a wall” 

.

There are so many ways to study, read and enjoy Talking Walls. I have complied a list of themes and think it would fun for teachers and students to find the walls that  align with the  themes.   What walls are man-made? How may talk about architects?  How many hats are in the book?   What stories do the hats tell?

Let me know if you have another theme to add to my list!

• Natural Walls
• Man-made walls
• World Heritage sites
• decorated walls
• memorial walls
• architecture
• religion
• animals
• emotions
• languages
• celebrations/anniversaries
• mysteries
• people
• poetry
• music/sounds
• environment
• hats/clothes
• math
• movement
• food

The world’s cities are coming up with ingenious ways to fight climate change, from massive sea walls to “sponge zones” and floating communities.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/energy/2015/07/150713-cities-thinking-ahead-on-climate-change/#/

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1472 

From Talking Walls Discover Your World

Thousands of messages decorate the fence outside  the home of Pablo Neruda, thanking him for his beautiful poems.At the age of ten Pablo wrote a poem so amazing that his father asked him who had really written him. Schoolmates made fun of the boy who said he was “hunting for poems.”

 

Pablo Neruda’s Fence still stands at Isla Negra, Chile, long after the poet’s 1973 death. It was built to keep his dogs from chasing sheep, and has become a message board, a shrine. On July 12, his birthday, people visit and pin paper messages to the wooden slats of the fence, carve words of love into posts, scrawl lines in charcoal that will be washed away and replaced with new messages, new prayers. A friend of his wrote: “There is not a scrap of the wood not written on. They all address him as though he were alive. With pencils or nail-points, each and all of them find a particular way of saying Thank you.”